How high-end virtual reality headsets could lose the cables

We have finally found a way to cut the cord in virtual reality. Freeing users from wires will give them a truly immersive experience.

Today’s top-end virtual reality headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, pump high-definition video to your eyes through a cable that trails to a computer or games console. But this limits your walking range and can get caught under your feet.

“It’s extremely annoying when you are playing a game,” says Omid Abari at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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To eliminate this problem, Abari and his colleagues have created a system called MoVR that can stream vast amounts of data to a VR headset wirelessly.

Until now, it was considered near-impossible to wirelessly stream high-res video from a computer to a VR headset in anything approaching real-world conditions. An uncompressed stream of such video uses multiple gigabits of data every second. Existing wireless systems such as Wi-Fi cannot support this data rate, and trying to compress the video stream so it fits into the available bandwidth takes a few milliseconds, which ruins the immersive effect and can make users feel sick.

Going higher

Instead, the MIT team turned to a different wireless technology called millimetre wave (mmWave), which is in a higher band of the frequency spectrum to that used by Wi-Fi. “When you go to that high frequency, there’s a huge amount of bandwidth available,” says Abari. “And because there’s a huge amount of bandwidth available, this technology can enable a very high data rate.”

But there is a problem. The mmWave signals need to be focused into a small beam, which means they are easily blocked if a user raises their hand between the headset and the router, or even just moves their head.

To deal with this, the MoVR device acts like a mirror that can bounce mmWave signals around a blockage. You stick the small device on the wall of the room and, when the signal from the computer can’t reach the headset, it is directed its way instead. The MoVR effectively reroutes the signal to a receiver on the headset, getting around any blockages. The researchers presented their system at the HotNets conference in Atlanta, Georgia, last week.

Other attempts to solve VR’s cable problem have tried to completely remove the computer from the equation and put everything into the headset. Some, such as the Samsung Gear, use a cellphone to process and display content, and Facebook recently revealed a standalone Oculus prototype called Santa Cruz. But the convenience of these devices comes at the cost of image quality.

Any VR device that tries to contain all its technical guts on your head will have limited computational and rendering power, says Hannes Kaufmann at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. “You simply can’t put that much rendering power in such a small space,” he says.